Streets on Fire (5 page)

Jack Liffey noticed the alley at the back of the yard, beyond a chain-link fence. It was filled with unspeakable drifts of rubbish, two feet deep. Apparently the city made no effort to clean it out.

“Have you done anything recently to attract bigots?”

“Breathing their air is enough for some of them. But no. My name doesn’t come up much anymore. I was interviewed on radio about my son’s disappearance, though, and Genesee still goes to events, so we’re not invisible in this town.”

An old German shepherd on a chain finally came awake and sauntered over soundlessly.

“He’s pretty quiet.”

“She woke me last night, but she couldn’t get out to get them.”

They talked for a while about cross-burnings Bancroft had seen in the South, but there was no more useful information forthcoming.

“I hear your son is a member of Umoja,” Jack Liffey tried. He was careful not to use the past tense.

The old man thought this over for a moment. “Well, not a
member
. Mr. Liffey, I spent my life fighting for civil rights and integration, and Genesee fought for proletarian internationalism, which she would tell you is an even more inclusive form of integration. Umoja does not believe in having any truck with whites, in any way, shape or form, and they certainly do not read the writings of German Jews or Hindu pacifists. Cultural nationalism, separatism, call it what you will—it’s an understandable response to a lot of unspeakable racial antagonism in this country, but it’s not our family’s way. And it wasn’t Amilcar’s.

“That said, Amilcar was a good friend of Kidogo Kukwenda. They went to Manual Arts together, played basketball together and graduated together, when Kidogo was still Clyde Waters. He’s a leader of Umoja’s youth wing these days, and he and Ami stayed friends.”

“Mr. Davis, I have to ask this. Knowing you and your wife feel the way you do, would Amilcar have told you if he joined up in the nationalist crusade?”

He sighed. “I’d like to think so. He told me he tried crack once. It scared the bejeezus out of him. Anyway, Amilcar has a white girlfriend. That’s just about the ultimate no-no for Umoja and he wouldn’t have put her at risk of insult. He’s a thoughtful young man, respectful of women.”

“Do you think Kidogo would talk to me?”

“He will, if I ask him to.”

For two days now, Jack Liffey had been thinking he wanted nothing more than to sit at this man’s feet and ask him to talk about his life, to ask about SNCC and Freedom Summer and the leadership struggles inside the Movement and what Martin Luther King had been like and what he felt about the future of race relations in America, but the timing was obviously wrong, with his son still missing. Still, he couldn’t resist entirely.

“How did you happen to come out to California?”

“Like everyone else who came here, I wanted a better life for my family.”

“Is it?”

He frowned and sighed. “I think the greatest mistake the African American people ever made was flooding out of the South for the promise of industrial jobs in the Rust Belt and the West. Look what they did to us. They needed us, particularly during the war. They clustered us here and used us for a generation and then they did to us, particularly during the war. They clustered us and used us for generations and then they closed all the plants or moved them overseas, and now we’re trapped here, discarded, no jobs, away from our roots, with no future.”

“You think it was a conspiracy?”

“No, Mr. Liffey, I don’t. But it happened. And nobody gives a damn to help fix it.”

She came marching up the road in the early evening, carrying the tiny suitcase like a plucky female Tom Sawyer, and his heart skipped a beat as it always did.

“Punkin, what’s up?” Jack Liffey tried to keep it light, sensing that the unannounced visit meant something bad had happened. He took his feet down from the porch railing, and tucked the case file back into its envelope.

“I came to stay a bit, if it’s all right.”

“Is it all right with your mom? The court says I must defer.”

“Mom thinks it’s a good idea.”

He let it go for the moment. “Come on up. How did you get here?”

“I took the bus up PCH and then Lincoln.”

“Aw, honey, you’ve been walking a half hour from Lincoln. You should have called.”

“It’s okay. It keeps me svelte.”

He smiled. “I thought you did that by vomiting.”

“Daddy!” He hugged her and felt a little tremble, as well as a kind of clinging he didn’t usually get. He also did his best not to notice her large breasts pressing against him. She wasn’t a girl starting to grow woman’s features any longer; she had crossed over to having a woman’s body now, and she was only a few inches shorter than he was. It was hard to define exactly what it was that took her appearance across that borderline to womanhood, but despite it, whatever it was, there was still a gawky girl inside the body.

“Let’s fix up the trundle bed in the side room. Mar, we got a bed-and-breakfast client!”

Marlena bustled out of the kitchen, stripping off a frilly apron done up as a brick wall that said
KISS ME—I’M POLISH
, and Maeve gave her a big hug.

“I’ll be right back, hon,” Jack Liffey said. He passed through the kitchen and the utility room, picking up the cordless phone on the way. He went down the back stoop and all the way to the low block wall at the tidy alley before dialing. Mar Vista was just enough upmarket from Bancroft Davis’s neighborhood that the city still cleaned out the alleys once in a while.

“Kathy, this is Jack. What’s up?”

“Is Maeve there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“With her suitcase?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I figured, when she wasn’t at her friend Dru’s. Maybe it’s best for a few days. Is it going to be all right?”

“Hold on, Kath. It’s all right at my end, but what is this about?”

There was a long pause with a lot of electronic whooshing on the line.

“Hello.”

He heard a sigh. “Things are a little tense, that’s all. Can we give it some space to work itself out?”

“Kath, she’s practically in tears. What happened?”

“She had a disagreement with Bradley.”

“Define
disagreement
.”

“Well, you’re going to find out sooner or later. You’ve got to understand, Maeve has gotten very sassy recently. She hasn’t really adjusted to him yet, and I think her hormones are catching up to her. She doesn’t pay attention. What happened is, she left the back gate open and the twins might have wandered out into traffic, so he was pretty upset.”

“Did… he… hit… her?” Each word was a separate achieve-ment in enunciation.

“He feels terrible about it, Jack. Really. He’s been apologizing nonstop since I got home. He just lost it for a second when she sassed him and it was just a little slap. He didn’t really
hit
her.”

Jack Liffey’s vision went red and he felt his heart start to thunder. “You tell him this for me, Kathleen. If he ever…
ever
touches Maeve again, I’ll break his arm in three places.”

“It wasn’t like that—”

“
Listen
to me. I know you don’t respect what I do. I just fell into it myself. I didn’t plan to make it my life’s work, but I
like
it now that I’m doing it. I rescue kids, I save kids from things, I find kids. There is no excuse on earth for hurting a child.”

“We feel the same way, Jack. Honestly we do. He’s already a little afraid of you, and he feels really terrible about it. It won’t happen again.”

“I have your word then,” he declared, not a hint of a question. He stabbed the button to ring off and breathed deeply in the motionless hot air off the alley. This was one of the things he had always dreaded—not being able to be there to protect her. But he knew it was inevitable, whatever happened. She was already separating from the main craft, a little lunar landing module readying herself to go her own way, and a good parent had to trust the years of training and encourage the separation.

*

“Want half of this?” Maeve glowered at the Tab in her hand as if it were bottled rat. For some reason Marlena loved Tab and wouldn’t buy Diet Coke.

“Yeah, it’s pretty bad, isn’t it? I’d love half.”

She frothed it over the ice in his glass, kissed his bald spot and sprawled back on the second lawn chair on the front porch. The TV muttered away indoors with one of Marlena’s favorite doctor shows. This, he thought, was as close to heavenly peace as anyone deserved.

They had already agreed not to speak any further for now about what had happened in Redondo Beach.

“What are you working on these days?” she asked. “Some runaway cultist from the Valley?”

“Sexier than that. Have you read about the college kids who disappeared from Claremont?”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully.

“He’s black, she’s white, and they were threatened by biker Nazis.”

“Oh,
yeah
. That’s famous, Dad! You’re going to be a famous detective.”

“Yeah, like the Hardy boy.”

“Or Nancy Drew,” she put in with a grin.

“Uh-huh. Same man invented them, you know,
and
the Rover Boys, too, and the Tom Swift books, but that was long before both of our times. He must have been a real terror with his quill pen.”

“Mom read Nancy Drew. I was just looking at them in an old box.”

A motorcycle ratcheted painfully up the street, with a hundred-gallon Stetson, big enough for Gulliver, covering the whole top of the bike. Eyeholes had been cut into the crown of the hat. They both watched the big two-wheeled hat disappear noisily around the corner. There were some things in life you would probably never figure out, he thought.

“One point each,” she said. For years they had played this game, and one point was a fairly tame reward. They’d once gone all the way to four for The Normandy Landing Restaurant. You entered up an artificial beach with a blown-apart landing craft and fake dead bodies and then, for no discernible reason, emerged into a room where every square inch of wall space was covered with glued-on Pez dispensers, plastic dolls, colored trinkets, Christmas lights, and varnished bread rolls. It was the cages of talking parrots greeting you near the door with insults in French that put it all over the top.

“What books did you read when you were young?” Maeve asked.

“Would you like me to lie and tell you I filled my evenings with
Moby Dick
or would you like the truth?”

She laughed. “You can’t lie. You’ve wrapped yourself in the most rigid ethical code of anyone I know—except that little problem you get sometimes, keeping your pants zipped.”

He winced. “I’ve been zipped up for a long time now, punkin.”

“Marlena must be good in bed then,” she whispered, with a feral grin.

He didn’t know what to reply. This sauciness of hers was a whole new tack. “I think maybe we could talk about something less personal—like hemorrhoids, for instance.”

She giggled. “Daddy, you’re embarrassed! It’s okay, you know. These days we learn all sorts of things younger than you did. Redondo High has a whole class on techniques of oral sex.”

He blinked and swallowed, and then decided that he’d better laugh, so he did. “I award one point to you, just for being you, Miss Bizarro.”

He broke down and owned up to his teen-age reading habits, which seemed preferable to talking about his sex life. Until his sixteenth birthday, he had read nothing but science fiction, working his way doggedly through the entire case of interplanetary romances at the San Pedro Public Library, book after book. And they were almost entirely without redeeming value, he admitted, except that they did encourage you to look at the world in fresh ways. She, on the other hand, was reading Charlotte Brontë and Dickens. She didn’t say a word about Nancy Drew.

“You folks okay out there?” Marlena called.

“We’re fine, Mar,” Jack Liffey replied.

“Are you going up to Claremont again on your case?”

“Sure.”

“You know, my cousin Mary Beth lives up there,” Maeve said. He must have looked blank. “Tom Leary’s daughter, you remember.”

The Learys. They were the people his dad had hauled him up there to visit about 1963, some very distant cousins, he guessed. He was astonished Maeve had found them and stayed in touch.

“I could call Mary Beth in the morning,” she suggested. “I think it would be good for me to get out of the city for a few days.”

He watched her carefully. Some other agenda was simmering away beneath the surface, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it might be.

“I’ll check with your mom.”

“Your all-purpose hedge,” she accused.

*

She waited until long past lights-out and then tiptoed out her door. She hesitated at the hallway for a moment to listen for exciting noises from her dad and Marlena down the hall, but there weren’t any. She wouldn’t
actually
eavesdrop, but if she happened to hear some panting or something juicy she was willing to let her imagination roam.

Then she went to his little post office desk in the alcove and sure enough there was the case file he’d been reading, back in its manila envelope. She carried it into her room, placed a rolled-up towel at the base of the door to block the light from leaking out, and turned on the old gooseneck lamp on the bed table.

Sitting crosslegged on the trundle bed, she set out the contents in tidy piles around her, making sure to keep everything in order. She looked at the eight-by-ten photos first, an astonishingly handsome young black man with a big square jaw and a neutral expression. Sherry Webber had a toothy smile and long ironed blonde hair which made her look like a throwback to the Joan Baez era.

There was the initial police missing persons report. A thick pad of stapled investigative reports written in a kind of impenetrable English with a lot of passive verbs; a number of statements that seemed to be taken from students at Pomona College and Scripps; a forensics report on a 1958 Chevrolet Impala; a long list of the contents of two dormitory bedrooms; a summary of an FBI investigation into some biker club in Fontana called Bone Losers, but not the report on the bikers itself; and another FBI summary about something called Umoja.